But there’s more to it than videoing, a house that you see on Zillow or Century 21. Take a look at this video, before you start putting up walls of doubts, you just need to think outside the box.

Well, what do you think? As I stated earlier, have an open mind to alternative options if your first doubts are this video was profesionally produced and that your property is nothing compared to your own home.

Here’s the secret sauce that you can apply about this video.

• Copy the way the video is arranged
• Copy the way the layout of the video
• Copy the way how they narrate the video
• Copy the way how they use the voice sound to make it an emotional experience
• Implement what other things that you see in the video to mimic for your own property
• Push the video out through as many Social Media channels as possible

Summary
Were you expecting something really special? Well, if you apply some of these suggestions to your video, your video will stand out more than the others. What, you don’t have a camera? If you’re limited in your resources, believe it or not you can do this with your smart phone. The idea is to take many shots, gather the compilation and edit. The magic is in the editing process, actually detail. (Walt Disney coin this term) If you’re strapped for cash and still think this isn’t worth doing and can’t. Then, you’re not hungry enough. If you still need more guidance on this, feel free to contact me in the comments below.

Some other facts about the video above. Video views on Facebook is over 11 million with over 92K shares.

Why social media and geolocation?
Again the goal of social media is like the old days of word of mouth marketing, once you’ve made some big impacts, people and other businesses will know who you are and will want to use your service. The purpose of geolocation is that you want the world, whether it’s international or locally, to know that your business exists and doing great things and what you’re about. Once other people see where you’ve (leaving a digital footprint)helped your customers, people will pique an interest, at least thats the idea of this soft marketing approach.

Here are some quick ways to add social media with an emphasis on using geolocation in marketing for the real world. This method helps you run a marketing campaign that ties the online and offline world together.

Say you offer a service based business like a heating & cooling service or maybe a company that picks up stranded drivers.

First thing first is that I assume everyone (businesses) by now has a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or the current popular Snapchat. You don’t have to have a profile on all platform, just choose one and stick with it. Be sure to enable the location services. Ok, in the following I’m going to break down by platform on how to market your business based on providing services, stay with me.

Second thing is we’re gong to assume that your business sends out techs to do a job, an estimation or maybe an installation of some sort. Even if you deliver flowers or another version of the “geek squad” coming to help you with computer hardware install.

Next up, I assume your techs have a mobile device with them. Be sure to be logged in with the company favorite social media and here we go.

Facebook
Upon completion of your tasks, be sure to get the customer sentiments on the job. Taking from Facebook here’s what you do after putting your accomplishments:

Tap the  Check In icon –  this adds a nearby location to your post.

Twitter
Same thing after completion of your tasks, do the following in your platform:

Tap the location icon.

Instagram
This platform works with Facebook so be sure to have the location service enabled. Once you post the picture Instagram automatically uses the location.
Tactical takeaways
Be sure to fill out the description with the relevant hashtag. For example, #JonService ws near the #circleofK store for a install/debug, mission accomplish, customer was happy!

Snapchat
Snapchat calls their location services as Geofilters and its a premium service. I won’t go into details on the costs, will let you handle that. Once you have Geofilters enabled and configured all you need to do is snap the images and post.

Tactical takeaways
Be sure to take multiple images of the tasks, it can be before and after with the description. Or you can capture some real challenges in the taskings highlighting certain steps that made it look better or greatly helped the customer problem. To truly make Snapchat work, you have to think outside the box and really tell the story as if in real-time. This is the differences between Snapchat and Instagram.

Last thing
These examples of businesses and social media platform are just the tip of the iceberg. The important thing is you have to think outside the box on many ways to share the experience. Including great images and narration is vital to this digital way of word of mouth. There are many other social platforms like Foursquare that you can implement, but I’d advise pick one or two. And, get really good at capturing images/videos and narate it in a compelling way so that others may want to share it. Any questions let me know.

There are many different types of framework to choose from, such as Jquery Mobile, Sencha, Kendo and Ionic Framework. To make this story short I chosed Ionic for its simplicity. Ionic framework works with AngularJs, yes this is a javascript framework. I had originally started with Jquery, but found that for mobile the library was just too heavy and much lag time.

I didn’t go native with java or ObjectiveC for ios or android, but going for a what’s called hybrid apps. Hybrid apps are written from HTML5, Javascript and CSS3. Ionic framework is the wrapper, AngularJs is the workhorse in terms of communicating with the data and injecting the view. It’s what you see on the page.

I only want to address the differences in the makeup of mobile apps vs a web apps in terms of views. With web applicatons we navigate from a page to another page by URL’s. Where as in a hybrid mobile apps we’re using 70% Javascript to inject the data (information) onto a page. So yeh, there isn’t really a url, but there actually is when coding this inside javascript.

The reason for this way of coding for mobile apps is the nature of the apps, we’re building a “Single Page Application” not multiple web pages. The apps itself is an object that does something like giving you information on the weather based on your device location or highlights stories from your blog which can be hooked up to your shopping cart. The list goes on of what you want to do with your apps.

Another thing that SPA is shooting for is to provide a positive (cool) user experience.

Index
Be sure to have a Google Webmaster Tool account and add your site for tracking. The best way to view if there’s any error in the index is to view the “index status” of GWT. Look at the total index, if your site has continuous content generated then you should see an uptrend. If you start seeing downward trend, its time you look at what’s not being indexed.

Crawl
Viewing the crawl errors page will show you the problem pages. Go over to the “crawl stats” highlights the activities of the bots. If you had some problems with duplicate pages or removed pages. There may be an increase in the “pages crawled/day” and “Kilobytes/day” by the bots to ascertain. “Time spent download/page” is important for the page load speed, the less time the better for user experiences.

There are many types of SEO tools that are utilized. Depending on the objectives, you may use a particular tool to look up a keyword or maybe to expand on the keywords. Or maybe you’re looking to see what your competitors Social Media presences looks like.  No matter what you’re using some sort of tool to look up something or as part of a distilled  process.

The purpose of this post is about creating a simple headless SEO tool that I’ve been working on that pulls information quickly about a web page. This is an agile tool, its not built out to be a robust tool, its specific to what I need to look up.

Objectives

Before we talk about specifics of the tools, we need to define what the objectives are. Are we just looking up a keyword to see how many competing websites, or are we trying to conduct a site audit? There is no one tool that does it all, unless its custom made for your multi-purpose. For the focus of this article, we will look at an agile  tool with a main function of looking up a specific thing, such as the meta data of a web page. Meta data is the information in the backend of a web page, usually located withing the header tag, ie <head>….</head>

This specific tool is initiated from the command line interface. In this article, I’m going to assume:

• That you’re on a Window 7 Operating System (other OS’s are fine, I’m on Window 7)
• Have PHP 5 + installed on your system.
• You know how to bring up the CLI (command line interface, cmd)
• You know PHP programming (beginner to intermediate level, ability to read & write the code)

Benefits of This Agile Tool

• Quick look Up
• Headless Web – means you don’t have to open your web browser.
• You can code your script to do almost anything from simple meta lookups to DOM manipulation.
• Can be coded in most web programming languages, for this illustrative post the script highlighted is written in PHP.

Start by creating a file with a .php at the end. Below is the code, I won’t go into the explanation of what it does, but mainly to get information from the meta tags of a web page.

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php

function getMetaData($url){
// get meta tags
$meta=get_meta_tags($url);
// store page
$page=file_get_contents($url);
// find where the title CONTENT begins
$titleStart=strpos($page,'<title>’)+7;
// find how long the title is
$titleLength=strpos($page,'</title>’)-$titleStart;
// extract title from $page
$meta[‘title’]=substr($page,$titleStart,$titleLength);
// return array of data
return $meta;
}

$tags=getMetaData(‘http://www.yoursite.com&#8217;);

echo ‘Title: ‘.$tags[‘title’];
echo “\n”;
echo ‘Description: ‘.$tags[‘description’];
echo “\n”;
echo ‘Keywords: ‘.$tags[‘keywords’];

?>

Next open up your terminal and navigate to where you have this file located. In the file be sure to identify the domain that you’re looking up. From the terminal you type in php nameofyourscript.php and press enter.  After a few seconds you would see the meta tags information of the domain. View the video below to get an idea.

So Whats the Big Fuss?

Well as I said earlier, this is a quick way to look up a domain info for SEO without opening up your web browser. Now you can build this out to look up:

• Other meta info
• multiple url’s lookup
• check page load speed
• scrape SERP listing of Google and Bing
• get locations of nearest pizza joint
• get twitter followers count
• scrape SocialMention results
• collect the links onpage and store to a database for further processing

As you can see what you do with the script is endless. Another note there are many different ways to write the previous script. I am not the most eloquent coder, just a newbie coder to manipulate things. Please feel free to comment and share with us on what you’ve created to help with your SEO process.

If you’re in a competitive market, and you have a decent budget to work with, this creative way of generating keyword discovery machine is awesome.

My contribution to this awesome tool is how to use it effectively to mine this keyword building gold mine.

In a perfect pixel world we are looking for keywords with good click through rates and conversions. However, I will share some thoughts on modifying it for industries that do not track conversions online.

So let’s get to the meat of this.

For starters I’m assuming that you have a kick ass ad in place.

I won’t go through the setup in this article, below is a diagram and a quick description:

 Setup

1. Create an Exact Match Campaign – insert exact match kw
2. Create a Phrase Match Campaign – Copy Exact match campaign, insert kw as phrase match, create a negative kw list as exact.
3. Create a Broad Match Campaign – Copy Phrase match campaign, insert kw as Broad match,  “  “   “  “ as phrase match.

A more thorough setup, can be found here.( http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2164527/How-to-Build-a-Keyword-Discovery-Machine-Using-AdWords)

The structure of it all with ad campaigns and groups in trio with phrase match excepted from broad match and exact match excepted from phrase match makes up the engine. This allows Google to consort your keywords with others it believes to be relevant, and this allows you to draw on Google’s wealth of query pairing data in a controlled manner. Now it’s time to mine the data in the broad and phrase campaign for the newly found keywords.

First Scenario – eCommerce Websites

We’re looking for keywords that have high clicks with good “Click Thru Rates”. Anything above 6% is good and a good conversion with a low cost per acquisition is ideal. The cost per acquisition will vary from product to product depending on the industry. Once you’ve identify keywords with these KPI’s, skip down to the Raw Search Querysteps.

Second Scenario – Businesses Based

Business that are a service based rely on online traffic, but conversions take place offline. As we scan the broad/phrase match campaigns we look for the top keywords with higher clicks than usual. Since there isn’t any conversion to bother with, we mainly focus on clicks with high click thru rate.

In some cases, you may not see any new keywords but there are still clicks for a general term in the broad campaigns. If so, will want to look at the raw search query for that term. This section shows the actual queries that were typed into the search field. With enough data these are worth looking at to bid for. You’ll discover a new raw search query, and should be looking for high number of clicks with decent click thru rates. Historically, most exact match keywords have better click through rates and conversions than broad/phrase match. Oops, we’re getting ahead of ourselves, here are the actual steps to view your newly found long tail.

 Raw Search Query

–          Select the keyword/s that you want to see then click on the “See search terms” you will see a pop down box, click on “Selected”.

You will then be able to see this:

By looking at this example you can see the actual query is “car alarms” with 32 clicks and 12% click thru rate at the exact match. So this data was quite helpful in recognizing what was being searched and numbers of clicks (the more the better), with decent click thru rates.  For ecommerce sites you may have conversions tracked, so this will be another KPI for you to weigh.

We would add this keyword to my exact match campaign. Also, add to the phrase campaign with broad excepted (negative kw list).

So all you do now is rinse, lather, and repeat. If you find that there are not any other keywords coming in then its time to expand your keyword sets. Here are some great references to check out on how to do this.

–          Using Keywords Effectively

–          Google Keyword Adword Tool

–          Keyword Spy

–          UberSuggest

Key Takeaway

-Building this keyword machine requires high search volume with large enough budgets to play with.

-You can set this up in conjunction with other campaigns.

-Monitor your broad and phrase campaigns weekly for any changes.

One of the many big buzz happening is the influence of Social Media in the SEO world. At the moment there isn’t a direct factor that saids if you #hash this, then you will rank high in the search engine. The effectiveness of the social media is more of an indirect factor. Social media search is totally different than from search engines.

Facebook markups known as “open graph” is gaining popularity. The purpose behind the markup is to communicate with Facebook API to integrate your website with the open graph protocol.  These tags are placed inside the <head> section of the webpage.

<head>
<meta property=”fb:app_id” content=”YOUR-APP-ID” />
<meta property=”fb:admins” content=”USER_ID,USER_ID”/>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Page Title”/>
<meta property=”og:type” content=”TYPE”/>
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.mydomain.com/page-url”/&gt;
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://URL-TO-IMAGE”/&gt;
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Description of page content” />
</head>

Next add your Facebook like button, there is a Javascritp/SDK that you can get from facebook.com/developer/.  Once installed on page, any visitors can like your page.

This like will appear on the visitor Facebook wall and your like button. What is unique about all of this is that this can be index by the search engines. This alone won’t make your website rank any higher but on the social search, this can show the connections which is connected to interests.

Likes vs Links

Links are fine for SEO purposes but “Like” is about word of mouth marketing. More than likely when you find things online you usually will read up on recommendations, reviews from business sources or people that you know.  The later is a more realistic view of what usually happens prior to making a committed transactional event. In other words making the conversion.  Many eCommerce sites are starting to utilize this markup for their product pages. Just visualize seeing the number of comments about the product or service and statistics have shown to increase the click thru rate by 20%.

Now its your turn to take action and apply this to your website. If you have any questions please leave them below. Cheers!

What this bookmarklet does is that it will display what the Facebook Open Graph would look like of segments if your web page has marked.

The important thing to understand is that when your viewers like your Facebook button. The data is then shown on the wall of that person and your like widget. (vary on your widget display) Socially this is the way to go to share this, and through the SEO perspective. This signal gets index by the search engine, which is a big plus.

Social signals does not cause your website to rank, but the search engines do detect the signal. Social search maybe an indirect factor in the search algorithm.

So here is the bookmarklet, all you need to do is drag this to your bookmark —->
Opengraph Meta <—

What is cool about this is that you can use this to spy on your competitor to see if they’re using the Facebook markup.  Again, as I stated, its not about being cool to have this tool, but using it on your blog, website to expand your branding.

Here’s a quick post on the new technology trending in the mobile market. Augmented Reality, is the next big craze for ecommerce and mobile apps. This technology allows you to use your camera on your smartphone and scan an object like your face. Takes a snapshot of your face and  applies a layer over to apply an image.

In this example I’m brainstorming with a car toy, that shows up on this paper.  This will be an application that we’ll be trying to take to the next level. The application is to have an object overlayed to your face like a hat, glasses, mask, etc…

When you’re doing SEO or PPC keyword research to expand your sets, keyword tools like Wordtracker, keyword discovery, Keyword Spy,and Mergewords can be a big help at the beginning of your research.

What happens when you’re stuck, and you need to expand your set of keywords that are more relevant to your audience search behavior and intent. Or maybe you need to expand more to consumers that are ready to buy your product or call up your service.

Some outside the box thinking on expanding your keyword reach can be found below:

• TagCrowd – throw in some keywords and let TC show you the KW cloud, from here you can prioritize the keywords.
• Google Insights – take a 1st tier keyword (phrases) plug it in and see the historical trends and pay attention to the “rising and break out searches”.
• Keyword Spy – a decent tool to look up keywords and domain information for competitive keyword research.
• Majestic SEO – Similar to Keyword Spy, but what separates it apart is the historical link velocity chart that gives you an idea of how much effort is your competitor putting into link acquisition.
• Merge Words – its great for SEO/PPC if you need to create your own blend (modifier), can easily copy & paste to spreadsheet.

These are some of the many keyword tools thats out there, and some I haven’t mention like Google Keyword tool, KW Discovery, and Market Samurai. The idea behind all this is the utilization of the tools, there is no one keyword tool that rules them all. It is the process of research when these tools come into play.

Expanding Keyword Sets

Say your managing a PPC account in Google Adwords that needs to be optimized to bring more targeted traffic. Your viewing all the keywords and wondering how are we going to expand more relevant keywords into the sets. There are a couple of routes to take from here.

Below are “relevant” and “rising” search options.

• Relevant is used when you’re digging deeper into the keyword sets. With this ideally, you’d want to be advertsing on Google Adwords or any 3rd party that can display the raw searches. You’re distilling down to the intent as much as possible.
• Rising is used when you’re looking to go after what’s trending at the moment. Normally using this approach works great if you’re running a PPC campaign and in a big market, and if you’re looking at the organic. Be sure that your website or blog is capable of ranking for some of the fresh term. For further reading into Quality Freshness recommend Justin Briggs post.

Relevant Searches

1. Viewing the “raw” search query in Google Adwords will display the actual search query typed into the box. You do this by selecting the keyword and go up to the “see search terms” and click on selected.
2. Export this list of raw searches and inserting it into TagCrowd. Tag Crowd will create a keyword cloud, you will be able to see what the main keywords are, and there may be more than one phrase.
3. Take those highlighted keywords from TagCrowd and insert one at a time into your choice of keyword tool – such as Google KW, Keyword Spy, or SemRush the choice is yours – The tools can expand these keywords further.

Rising Searches for Freshness

1. View your list of keywords from Google Adwords or Analytics and look at your top query that isn’t branded. Usually will be a service or product phrase.
2. Once selected plug this keyword phrase into Google Insights to view historical trends and rising searches.
3. Pay attention to the season and rising searches, as this will cue you in on which keywords to go after.

Summary

There you have it are a couple of ideas to implement on how to use your keyword tools. This post is just the tip of the iceberg on keyword research and implementing action. Many more ways to use tools, in future post we will cover other aspects of what do we do with our competitor data. So, what are some of your ways of doing kw research, please share at the comment box.

Seattle Tacoma SEO